The Portable Antiquities Scheme

Last Friday (20th June 2008) the British Museum’s departmental web representatives had a presentation from George Oates one of the key people behind the relatively new initiative from Yahoo!’s Flickr team known as “The Commons“. It was an interesting talk, and highlighted what they are trying to achieve, and why this service could be beneficial to the Museum Sector as a whole. George has been in the UK talking to a variety of Museums and at a couple of conferences, notably UK Museums on the Web 08 (I went to Mash Day but had to miss the conference.) So this is sort of what I remember……

Presently, they have 5 museums/national institutions signed up to their programme (several more on the way shortly) and these include:

1. The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (as ever leading the way - catch up the rest of you!) - Commons pages | Museum site
2. The Brooklyn Museum - Commons pages | Museum site
   
3. The Library of Congress - Commons pages | Institution site
4. The Smithsonian Institution - Commons pages | Institution site
5. Bibliotheque de Toulouse - Commons pages | Library site

The idea behind the commons according to Flickr’s website is this:

The program has two main objectives:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

All the images held within the repositories have been attributed as “No known copyright”, which flickr explain as:

Participating institutions may have various reasons for determining that “no known copyright restrictions” exist, such as:

1. The copyright is in the public domain because it has expired;
2. The copyright was injected into the public domain for other reasons, such as failure to adhere to required formalities or conditions;
3. The institution owns the copyright but is not interested in exercising control; or
4. The institution has legal rights sufficient to authorize others to use the work without restrictions.

By signing up and releasing their institutions images onto Flickr’s website, exposure is increased drastically and collective knowledge can be harnessed and used to enhance their knowledge via either tagging or via commentary from the registered flickr user. [The last part of this should be extremely important to participating instituitions, comments or tags are assigned to a registered user, so abuse can be tracked back easily and comments removed if need be. George assured us that no abuse of this facility is known yet on these sets.]

If one looks into the social statistics attached to each member of the commons so far, it can be seen that there are some distinct returns on investing time in this facility (some stats returned by querying the API for XML output):

1. Brooklyn Museum - 2852 items uploaded, 2055 contacts, users have entered 1,171 tags (some in Arabic), 429 images have been added to people’s favourites and a wide variety of comments have been added . They say about using the Commons:
   

   We believe that by sharing these images we will support a better understanding of the cultures that have created the great art that is held by this Museum. We hope you will agree.

2. Powerhouse Museum - 575 items uploaded, 576 contacts, 1667 tags, 61 items have been added as favourites.
3. Library of Congress - 3815 items uploaded, (apparently 10,000 contacts but I couldn’t get this up on their account or the number of favourite images!), 17084 tags (some multi lingual).
4. Smithsonian Institution - 862 images, (as above for contacts and favourites, maybe because I’m in the UK? dunno,
5. Bibliotheque de Toulouse - 324 items uploaded, 3 contacts, (same for favourites), 67 tags

George showed some slides demonstrating how the tagging process changed over the first 24 hours of the release for the Library of Congress and Brooklyn. I didn’t write notes, so I can’t give you any figures for these. However, within Jane Finnis‘ blog, she refers to the Library of Congress’ flickr page stats:

Within the first month:
- Over 5 million page views for LoC Flickr account
- 60,000 tags, 10,000 unique (So, a tag “woman” added to 5 photos)
- About 400 people added one tag, all the way up to one person adding 5,000!
- Roughly 5,000 comments
-[..]made about 12 updates to their catalogue based on corrections they’ve received via Flickr!

I think these stats demonstrate the wide social appeal of using flickr as a medium for disseminating imagery from Museum collections and events.

After George’s presentation, we asked a variety of questions (all handled ably) which ranged from:

1. Will video uploading be available under the commons (would save server space/ bandwidth immensely for cash strapped institutions) - answer was no not at the moment, they’re all about the image.
2. What happens if Flickr were bought out (eg Microsoft did buy Yahoo!) - tools would be released that would allow users to retrieve their photos.
3. Are these images available via the API yet? - George didn’t give a complete answer on this one. By doing some playing around, it seems that they are as shown by the slideshow below of Brooklyn’s lantern slides from Egypt - fantastic images:

4. Exif data usage - as much as possible
5. Uploading tools - same as the general user with the flickr uploader tool
6. Moderation - self moderating by the institution that has participated, no known moderation as yet
7. Can the same tag be added by multiple users? - No, there is a one tag one photo relationship. Once that word has been used, it is unavailable.
8. How many Museums are on flickr at the moment - no idea
9. Which Museum is next to release - secret At the Mash up day, people were postulating that the NMM would be soon…..

The Scheme currently uses Flickr for a very different method of usage to the Commons. We don’t have a huge server facility, in fact we’re running at near capacity with just the data we’re collecting daily on the archaeological discoveries of the public. Therefore, we’ve been hosting our more press worthy and social images on flickr to allow them to be exposed to the press (they can download them from the all sizes option as we release all our images under creative commons), allow people to annotate or comment on them and just to increase exposure. I’ve been using Chris Heilmann’s flickr badge for a while now on our front page to pull these images back onto our front page and the geo referenced ones will be incorporated into a map in the new website come 2009. I think Flickr is a great resource and I hope it keep developing and providing new ways of disseminating pictures of Heritage, life etc.

OpenCalais helped to tag this with: api • British Museum • Brooklyn Museum • Congress • Egypt • flickr uploader tool • George Oates • Library of Congress • Microsoft • Powerhouse Museum • Smithsonian Institution • Sydney • The Library of Congress • United Kingdom • Which Museum • XML • Yahoo!

Possibly related posts: Microformats implemented (on the blog at least) • PAS flickr feed made public • Adding more microformats •